American Scene

BOSTON | A letter announcing the victory at Fort Ticonderoga that went missing from the state archives six decades ago has been recovered after being spotted as part of a planned auction.

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin said the 1775 letter from Joseph Warren was discovered in a Sotheby’s catalog of Revolutionary War manuscripts. The state negotiated the letter’s return.

At the time, Warren was a doctor and president of the Provincial Congress that sat in Watertown, Mass. In the letter, he said he had just learned that Col. Benedict Arnold had captured Fort Ticonderoga, N.Y., and forts at Crown Point and St. John’s in the Lake Champlain area, which reduced the threat of British attack from Canada.

Warren died the same year in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

MONTANA

Changing ‘Redskins’ mascot mulled by school board

RED LODGE | A southern Montana school district’s trustees will vote Tuesday on whether the district’s public high school should drop its Redskins mascot.

The Red Lodge School District board held a hearing on the topic Wednesday night. Comment was evenly divided between those supporting the 60-year tradition of the Redskins mascot and those who say it’s a derogatory term referring to American Indians.

Weighing heavily on the trustees was a letter from the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council asking them to change the mascot.

Trustees Steve Haman and John Elsberry said they felt compelled to make the change.

The vote is scheduled for Feb. 15. The school has not yet developed a list of alternative mascots.

Nearly 20 colleges with American Indian mascots have switched their logos in recent years, after the NCAA in 2005 determined the nicknames and images were “hostile and abusive.”